A digital camera has a use of recording data as material of a composite image, for example. The composite image is widely used to print a greeting card with a photo, a framed photo seal, etc. Therefore, it is desirable that the digital camera should be provided with a function of displaying the combination result on an electronic view finder.
JP-A-2001-45352 discloses a digital camera for recording composite image data provided by combining background representation data and subject representation data in external memory and displaying the composite image on a liquid crystal panel after photographing.
JP-A-2000-358206 discloses a digital camera for recording subject representation data and data to set the print range, etc., to print the subject representation data so as to comply with a certification photo, etc., in memory in association with each other and displaying a subject image on an external display together with a frame indicating the trimming area at the printing time.
By the way, in image combination processing, to combine a subject image and any other image recorded in a digital camera and print a greeting card with the subject image allocated to a half of a postcard and a message and an illustration allocated to the remaining half, for example, the image size may become large, namely, the number of pixels may increase as the images are combined. Generally, the digital camera is designed so as to be able to record subject images in several sizes of 640×480 pixels, etc., and display a subject image of a specific size on a display at high speed. However, if the size of the subject image that can be displayed at high speed differs from the image size resulting from combination, scaling processing of interpolation, thinning out, etc., needs to be performed by executing a program and thus the display speed of the composite image becomes low. Therefore, in a mode in which a plurality of subject images recorded in memory are selected in order for display, when a subject image used for combination is selected, if an attempt is made to display a composite image rather than the subject image, if the subject image and the composite image differ in image size, the wait time until the subsequent subject image is displayed is prolonged as the composite image is displayed; this is a problem.